Category: Uncategorized

On March 20th, I finally succumbed to this craze that is called “Twitter.” A couple of my friends had already started using it, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to try out this new social networking medium. I admit I was also interesting in following people like Alton Brown and LeVar Burton, just out of the curiosity factor. 648 tweets later, I think I actually like the twittery thing — I still can’t stand that restrictive 140 character limit, but I’ve obviously made due. It hasn’t exactly changed my life, but it has made life a little more interesting.

While writing my post on Tuesday, I think I actually had my “AHA!” moment of the year. Rather, I set in motion the feelings for the rest of the day that led to my moment. It all started with the assertion that I am, in fact, a full-fledged adult. Now, I was very mousy from middle school onward (you can blame the whole “you picked the wrong people to sit with if you wanted to be ‘cool’ around here” issue — well, I think I picked correctly, honestly), and I had trouble feeling like I “fit in” with any particular group. By about halfway through ninth grade, I began to realize that I shouldn’t bother trying to fit in with anyone. If people were going to be my friends, they should be friends with me because they like who I am — not who they want me to be or who I’m pretending to be.

For several years, I’ve still battled with the issues of “I want people to like me” vs. “I want to be respected and like for exactly who I am.” I’ll withhold information about myself if I think a person will think less of me, for example I might not share with an elderly person that I’m listening to some incredibly loud and offensive metal. I am a product of my upbringing, and my uncle did live with us at one point — I was bound to love screaming, growling male voices set to guitars roaring and drums blasting. I might not admit to others that I’m a Catholic who actually, truly believes in God and Jesus simply because I fear being seen as “one of those people,” as if having religious faith will suddenly decrease my IQ or make my accomplishments any less. For much of the time I was completing my degree, I would conveniently fail to say I was a young wife and mother because I felt like that automatically made me look like ignorant white trash. For me to be ignorant, I shouldn’t have been capable of earning a high school diploma and gaining acceptance to the University of Florida. If I were trashy, I wouldn’t care about finishing a degree. And yet, I still worried about how others perceived me as a human being.

You can probably thank Brenda Della Casa for all her musings because she has been inspiring me to be who I am — in her words, to be authentic. She seemingly has been there, done that on nearly every issue I’ve dealt with in my life, and she has shown to be a woman of invaluable character. When I read her words, I sit back and realize that it doesn’t matter if someone doesn’t like me for who I am. If people don’t like me for who I am, then they are not the kind of people I want or need in my life. I need to surround myself with people who respect and encourage me. I think I’ve been doing a fairly decent job of that as of late. I know I still worried about how people would respond to my decision to have my baby at home with a midwife, but I realized I was falling back into the habit of needing to “fit in.” Mainstream is very overrated, and I’m glad to be my own unique individual.

When I got my positive result on February 24th, I joked to Brian that he could have just as easily made me happy with flowers and chocolate on my birthday. A Valentine’s conception translated out to a potential for having a fresh bundle of joy on my birthday, or at the very least within a few days of my birthday. On November 3rd, I received the best gift of the year four days after my own birthday — Brian Jr. The experience in and of itself was just so wonderful (clearly I’ve forgotten the pain and soreness), and having that final addition to the family has just been so… soothing. My little Pumpkin has been a sweet baby with a definite desire to become mobile faster than the average baby. Debbie has reminded that he’s had the advantage of no medications in his system — so many babies come out with residual side effects from the pain medications most women receive during labor and delivery. My previous two had the residual effects from spinal blocks used to numb my lower half in order to extract them from my abdomen. No matter what, Brian Jr. is going to be a very different baby than even I am used to. I’m so glad I get to experience it all, and I’m looking forward to ringing in the new year as a whole family. Merry Christmas, my sweet little Pumpkin!

I’m so incredibly grateful today for all the time I’ve had to prepare the final posts of the Gwen Bell Blog Challenge. I’ve scheduled each post to be published on the specific days of their corresponding prompts, and I’m finally happy with how much content I’ve been able to produce during the month. I’m also very grateful that I had the time to devise a new system for the mail (instead of a simple “mail is in/not in” sign, we now have a “[day of the week] mail is in” system). I won’t have to worry about forgetting to change the sign first thing in the morning. Tonight we will be enjoying our traditional meal of roast beast (a nod to Dr. Seuss’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas) and opening one present each before bed. We will be leaving out cookies and milk for Santa, and I will finish wrapping all the gifts. Tomorrow will be a day of good food, family, and presents. This year, two of my three kids will fully understand the concept of opening presents, and I couldn’t be more excited. I admit I live more vicariously through my daughter than my oldest son because my daughter receives gifts I would also have enjoyed as a child — My Little Ponies. Hot Wheels cars? Not so much.

I hope that everyone can enjoy the simple things in life during this wonderful time of the year. Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it!

Writing about a startup company implies I worked with a startup company this year. None of the companies I worked with were startups as of this year, nor can I really think of a true standout if I did indeed work with a startup. I would love to ramble on about my husband’s graphic and website design skills, but he’s currently out of commission until further notice. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing — it just means we’re living the life of full-blown role reversal. There’s nothing wrong with Dad staying at home with the little ones while Mom basks in her finally-hit-two-years, no-more-entry-level status, is there? You may have seen how offended I get when someone does have a problem with this arrangement, but I may have been a little too [redacted] happy around that time. That’s what happens when you get a little cash in exchange for your words — you start snapping it up as much as possible. I certainly want to get paid to write so I can live that dream, but for now I write for free (or until [redacted] sends decent work for decent pay my way — none of that “get a buck for hocking some spammy filth” nonsense).

Writing about a web tool that’s changed my life almost works — but Adobe InDesign CS4 is not quite a “web” tool. InDesign does have some have some web usage, but it’s more or less used for print-based documents in my personal opinion. I did, however, absolutely fall in love with the program’s applications. It completely changed my views of Adobe in general.

I’ve learned so many things from so many experiences this year that I’m not entirely sure I’m going to write on that prompt. How can I choose one lesson that changed me? I have to admit that 2009 has been quite eventful for me. I’ve also had many moments in which the realization that I most certainly am not a child in any sense of the word anymore (unless you want to count the sensing of being someone’s offspring). I go to work everyday. I pay rent. I pay bills. I have children. I have a husband. I am sprouting gray hairs and wrinkling! The attitude of “I’m not a child anymore” isn’t just an angtsy teenaged outburst — it’s a fact of life. I’m currently nearly the zenith of that hill everyone talks about. You know, THAT hill — the “you’re 30, now you’re over-the-hill” hill! I will gladly accept your flattery that I don’t look a day over 20, but that won’t make the increasingly visible crow’s feet and smile lines disappear. No, I’m just going to have to adopt another frame of thought (Brenda Della Casa replied to my tweet to “think of them as proof of a life well-lived,” actually).

You can count on me to detail the best gift of the year, be it the 24th, the 25th, or the 26th when I actually post about said gift. Insight/aha moment? That may very well be similar to the learning experience of the year. I’ll have a social web moment to share, I have a bit of stationery I’ll talk about, I won’t pick one single laugh of the year, I may or may not finally remember a good ad, and I’ll finish out the year with the resolution I wish I’d stuck with (or at least regret not being able to carry-out). You can count on me to share my gratitude as well. What will 2010 bring? We’ve only got a week and a half left to find out.

You may recall that I had the challenge of learning Adobe InDesign CS4 this year, and you no doubt recall that I said most of my “bests” revolved around the same basic themes. So you may have guessed that the best project of the year was that very first newsletter I designed all by myself (okay, Brian made the cover, but he’s way cooler with his awesome graphic designing skills). If you browsed through it, you can probably tell I may have gone overboard with the special effects, but I had an absolute blast layouting out the articles and pictures, designing the pages, and seeing the final printed product. I may have let a couple of typographical errors slip past my usually watchful eye, but it was overall a lovely project to be proud of.

I’m gearing up to complete the layout of our winter 2009 Newsletter, even though it won’t be going to print until January. I plan to tone it down on the special effects, though. 😉

Now, I know what you’re thinking: your baby is the best new person of the year! While this is most definitely true — goodness knows I’m just about as proud as can be when everyone tells me what beautiful babies I make — I have to sing the praises of another person who came into my life this year. Debbie was simply a name thrown out by the women in my local ICAN chapter at the start of the year. Debbie is about an hour’s drive from me, so she wasn’t the first midwife I interviewed. Luckily the first midwives I interviewed didn’t want to touch me with a ten-foot pole, and even more luckily the midwife who trained Debbie during her residency happened to be at the clinic I go to for well-woman care when I went to at least try and initiate some sort of prenatal care with anyone who could at least do so. (It may have been my third go-around past the 6 week mark, but that didn’t mean I felt like I could go it alone like some women do.) That midwife reassured me that she’d trust Debbie with the delivery of her grandchildren, so I went straight home and left her a voicemail. She called back within 15 minutes and set up our first appointment.

We met in mid-May, and she made sure to do all the vitals — and find the heartbeat on the fetal doppler since I was extremely anxious to hear it. See, I have this thing about hearing the heartbeat that makes me feel like, “ahh, it’s alive, all is well.” I suppose that comes with the territory after you’ve had a few miscarriages, even if the last pregnancy resulted in a full-term, healthy baby girl. She was very nice, she gave me some encouragement that she had given birth naturally to two 9lbers herself, and we made plans for when the next appointment would be.

She really showed how wonderful of a woman she is by making the trip up to me for all the prenatal appointments and taking me to the consultation to get my sign-off. She really never brought up issues about my prior c-sections or things like that — it was noted in my chart, sure, but it wasn’t a constant theme of my prenatal care. She treated me like a human being, like a normal pregnant woman (“because you are a normal pregnant woman!” she said to me once). Every other care provider I’ve ever dealt with always fussed over the fact that I’ve got this scar on my uterus. Somehow that scar on my uterus made me less of a person to nearly everyone else in the world. Not Debbie. Debbie could see past that horrible reminder of what happened to me when I was still just barely an adult, a reminder that I was treated as an ignorant child who deserved to be sliced right before dinner time. She could see that I was still a woman with a strong will and determination. She didn’t judge me based on my past naïveté. She judged me for my character and personality, for the faith and desire I had. I wasn’t some terrifying leper. I was just a normal pregnant woman.

On November 3rd, she helped us welcome our sweet little pumpkin into the world. She told me how proud she was of me and how she can’t help sharing my story with others (she’s got my full permission to do so as I’m so proud to be on the encouraging end of the spectrum now). She has helped us in so many ways, and I would love to ramble on all about it. Instead, I will wrap this up by saying I’m so incredibly glad I decided to interview. I’m so glad I was encouraged to give her a call and look past that hour’s distance. Long distance worked out for me before (in fact, today marks 9 years since I met my husband online), and it worked out for me again. While she can’t stop bursting with joy about how beautiful my HBA2C was, I can’t stop bursting with joy about how wonderful Debbie is as both a midwife and a human being. She’s my heroine of 2009!

In keeping with my whole issue of having my “bests” all be about the same thing, here’s a little about the car ride from my best trip of 2009. On the drive to Winter Park, Debbie and I talked about where she grew up (she’s from Newfoundland), a vacation she went on a year or two ago, and other such things. We stopped to pick up Lauren, another client of hers who also needed to get a VBAC sign-off/ consultation. Lauren was a very nice person with very interesting stories of her own. She lives down in Hommasassa, which I know best for Hommasassa Springs State Wildlife Park.

I had packed a healthy lunch and some healthy snacks as the consulting OB had already spoken with Debbie and me about cutting out bad carbs to help keep the baby from getting too big (because, lo and behold, sugar will make a fetus get chubby, too!). We did stop for lunch, though, because Debbie and Lauren hadn’t brought any lunch. Believe it or not, I was strong enough to abstain from lo mein that day — even though Debbie offered to buy me lunch. If you know me and my noodle-loving ways, you’ll realize that I had strong willpower that day. I love pasta, I love Italian food, and I love greasy, salty, yummy lo mein noodles. Anyhow, they did offer to let me steal a bit of theirs, and I gladly snatched a couple bits of broccoli from Lauren. I may have snatched some chicken from Debbie, too, but I can’t remember. Anyhow, we sat in the little Chinese restaurant and ate (I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on whole wheat — I said “no bad carbs,” not “no carbs”). Then we headed down the road to Kelly’s house for the consultation.

At the end of the consultation, we headed back on the road. The sun was beginning to get lower, and we had the joy of heading back west while watching the sunset. First we dropped off Lauren, and then we headed back up to my place. I got to learn a lot about both my midwife and another like-minded person. (I’m sad that I didn’t give Lauren my email address instead of telling her that I’m the only one with my name on FaceBook — I had forgotten that I opted to keep my profile out of the search feature on there, so I’m guessing she didn’t find me. That sucked because I don’t know her last name. Such is life, right?)

This morning was a bit hectic. I hadn’t gotten to bed until after midnight because I got a late start baking all the cookies I had prepared the couple days before. I kept needing to reorganize the fridge because the cookie doughs began to take up a lot of space and made it difficult to remove anything else. The baby was a little bit fussy, so I knew better than to lay down and try nursing him to sleep — no, this was a job for the rocker recliner. I lulled him to sleep and got some sleep myself. This morning was a mad dash out of the house to get to the bus stop on time (during the winter break, the bus service is reduced down to every half hour for my particular route — it’s only one bus going around). However, I was pleasantly surprised to see Lori on the route instead of the usual guy. He’s on vacation, so Lori’s taking over the reduced service for the next couple of weeks. She’s not pleased about driving it as early in the morning as it starts, but I’m sure glad to see her. This means she’s going to be looking out for me to make sure I’m not left behind to either wait half an hour or walk (and trust me, sometimes I’d rather just walk so as not to feel like I’m just wasting time). I am so grateful to have her driving for the next couple of days before the university closes and throws us out for our mandatory vacation.

I’m also quite grateful that I got my Christmas cookie baking handled. I’ve got a few batches packaged up and awaiting pick-up from our FedEx driver, and I’m even hoping people I have spoken to in a while get to enjoy some cookies. I guess I’m just feeling very good about life right now — but that might be the extra sugar and chocolate talking!

RIP Pip

The beginning of the year found me desperately trying to replace my mp3 player, Pip. Pip was a Philips GoGear Hdd6330 30GB Jukebox that I had saved up many gift cards from my birthday and Christmas back in 2005, and I happily purchased him in 2006. I took Pip everywhere with me — riding the bus to classes, riding the bus to work, riding the bus to the store, riding the bus…. See a pattern here? I couldn’t leave my home by myself without my trusty little Pip tucked neatly into a pocket or bag. He gave me so much ear candy and musical love, and I loved him, too. Toward the end of last year, his battery began to wear down. He wouldn’t hold a charge for quite as long as he did in the past. I searched for battery replacements, but sadly his creators did not build him for battery replacement. Instead, I found ways around this dilemma and made sure Pip always got recharged after every use (well, mostly). Then one day in January or February, I noticed he wasn’t showing the recharging info while being plugged in. Odd, I thought to myself. He’s always on when he’s plugged in. I tried switching him on only to discover a screen saying something about no information being found. File corruption! My beloved Pip had died. Anxiety crept over me. Where would I get my musical fix from every time I left home? What was I to do? Sit quietly and listen to conversations on the bus? Potentially get roped into conversations with some of the interesting locals?! I was terrified.

So, I took to the internet to search for the best deal on a replacement. Now you need to understand something very, very important: I am anti-iPod. iPods require you to use iTunes from everything I’ve heard. What happens with all the music from my CDs then? Instead of leaving it up to chance (and forking over my cash to Steve Jobs), I go with anything else that has a good review and price. Wal-Mart and Target failed me. This isn’t so bad considering Wal-Mart has rubbed me the wrong way on several occasions. So that left Amazon.com. After careful consideration, I decided on the Creative Zen 8GB with an expandable SD slot. The reviews seemed good overall, the price was right, and it has the ability to cheaply get upgraded to 24GB with a 16GB SD card. I haven’t been disappointed with my purchase. (Please note: I’m not getting paid to endorse this product. Should Amazon or Creative Labs wish to change that, though, I do accept paypal. 😉 )

The orders didn’t stop there. My laptop battery needed to be replaced, so I found a good solution on Amazon. Then my laptop power adapter needed to be replaced. Then… I was hooked. I was so hooked that practically all my Christmas shopping was done on Amazon.com. I have some stocking stuffers to purchase still — uh-oh, I need to hurry up! — that wouldn’t be worth paying shipping and handling for. I stopped just short of joining Amazon Prime. Maybe I should reconsider, though.